Evan Coyne Maloney has a perspicacious explanation for the woes of the mainstream media:
While it is true that the quickening pace of technological change caught the old media off guard, much of the media’s current predicament is largely of its own making. By intertwining their most valuable differentiator (facts gathered at some expense) with something that’s increasingly ubiquitous and free (opinions), media outlets diminish the perceived value of their product and send a muddled message to news consumers.
Although there are bloggers who have done excellent first-hand reporting, most bloggers are not equipped to compete with the core competency of large news-gathering organizations. Instead, bloggers tend to function as filters, amplifiers, analyzers and fact-checkers for stories that have been reported (and under-reported) by the establishment media. . .
By seeing bloggers as direct competitors, outlets put themselves in a position of competing on their greatest weakness while at the same time undermining their greatest strength. Instead of competing in the arena of gathered facts, many in the traditional media have responded to the rise of online outlets by deciding that they need more opinion in their product, not less. The problem with that is, the news media has been insisting for decades that they’re “objective.” . . .
Yet under the guise of “news analysis,” “putting things in context,” giving “perspective” and “helping you understand,” the news media insists on wrapping what should be its unique product—hard-to-gather facts—in packaging that makes their product look similar to everything else that’s available online for free.
Maloney makes a very good point, and I think there’s a lot of truth in it. Let’s perform a thought experiment, though. Suppose that the media is behaving rationally. Suppose that it makes sense for the media to focus on opinion over facts. What could be the reason?
It strikes me that the most plausible reason is that the media is no longer good at gathering facts, if indeed they ever were. By focusing on opinion, they are competing in what their core competency is, not what it should be.
As evidence, consider Iraq. The war in Iraq is the most important story in the world today (other than possibly the 2008 elections), and yet the media won’t cover it. We have to rely on bloggers (particularly the three that Coyne links) to tell us what’s actually happening there. The media’s reporting is limited to press releases and unreliable stringers, and increasingly little of those. (And this is despite the fact that embedding is actually free.)
Indeed, we see evidence almost daily that the media is barely better at gathering facts than it is at gathering non-facts. I think Maloney is right that the media should focus on original fact-gathering, but I conjecture that they are no longer good at it.
If I’m right, we will see the news media’s die-off continue, as outlets that cannot compete go out of business. The ones that survive will be the few that know (or can learn) how to gather news. Of course, before that happens, we will see calls for the government to bail-out the media and insulate them from competition.
Internet Scofflaw 